Debian/Ubuntu Packaging for OVN

This document provides instructions for installing OVN on Debian and Ubuntu, either from distribution packages or by building .deb packages from source. Instructions for installing OVN from source without packaging can be found in the OVN on Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD.

The steps below are practically the same for Debian and Ubuntu.

Installing from Packages

Debian and Ubuntu provide pre-built OVN packages. You can install them using apt-get as superuser.

For a central node (runs OVN databases, ovn-northd and ovn-ic):

$ sudo apt-get install ovn-central

For each host/hypervisor (runs ovn-controller):

$ sudo apt-get install ovn-host

Additional packages:

$ sudo apt-get install ovn-common              # shared components
$ sudo apt-get install ovn-controller-vtep     # VTEP gateway support

Note

The packaged version available in distributions may not be the latest OVN release.

Building .deb Packages from Source

Build Requirements

Install the standard Debian packaging tools and the OVN build dependencies. On Debian/Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential fakeroot devscripts
$ sudo apt-get install graphviz autoconf automake bzip2 \
    debhelper dh-autoreconf dh-python libssl-dev libtool \
    openssl procps python3-all python3-sphinx \
    python3-twisted python3-zope.interface \
    libunbound-dev libunwind-dev

The second set of packages corresponds to the Build-Depends list in the debian/control file of the OVN source tree.

Bootstrapping

Refer to Bootstrapping.

Configuring

Refer to Configuring.

The Debian build rules configure OVN with --enable-ssl, --enable-shared, and --with-ovs-source. If you are building manually, make sure to prepare the OVS sources first as described in the bootstrapping section.

Building

The OVSDIR environment variable must point to a fully configured and built OVS source tree (i.e., one where ./boot.sh, ./configure, and make have been run) before building the packages:

$ export OVSDIR=/path/to/built/ovs

You can then build the .deb packages using dpkg-buildpackage:

$ dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc

Or using debuild:

$ debuild -us -uc

Both methods use the debian/rules file which takes care of configuring, building, and packaging.

This produces the following .deb packages:

ovn-common: Shared OVN components (ovn-nbctl, ovn-sbctl, ovn-trace, ovn-appctl, ovn-detrace, ovn-ctl, man pages).
ovn-central: OVN DB servers, ovn-northd and ovn-ic for the central node.
ovn-host: ovn-controller for each host/hypervisor.
ovn-controller-vtep: ovn-controller-vtep for VTEP gateways.

Installing

Install the packages using dpkg:

$ sudo dpkg -i ovn-common_*.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i ovn-central_*.deb     # on central node
$ sudo dpkg -i ovn-host_*.deb        # on each host

Note

dpkg does not automatically resolve dependencies. If you encounter dependency errors, run sudo apt-get install -f to install the missing dependencies.

Reporting Bugs

Report problems to https://github.com/ovn-org/ovn/issues or discuss@openvswitch.org.